Solidarity Forever: Labor Union Families, Gender, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Status

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 23. Social Movements, Collective Action and Labor Resistance

Abstract

Research on labor unions tends to emphasize how labor unions historically shaped income inequality through their influence on men’s wages. However, this perspective both overlooks the capacity of unions to shape contemporary inequality through their intergenerational influence on families, and the transformations wrought by women’s unionization beginning in the 1980s. In this paper, multiple waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) are used to link parents in the 1980s to their children in the 2000s to analyze the correlation between parents’ union status and children’s income. A new operationalization of union status reveals that union mother families differed substantially from father unionized and jointly unionized households by the 1980s. Multiple pathways are then explored that link parental unionism to the transmission of economic status, demonstrating that fathers and joint unionism is connected to children’s income via the income benefits of unionism and its association with children’s education. Finally, analysis by gender of the children shows an important “union family” effect on income for daughters inexplicable by other mediators, but no such relationship for sons. These findings offer both expanded support for research on unionism’s link to intergenerational outcomes and offer new findings of how gender mediates this connection.

Author

• Andrew Ford Messamore, University of Texas at Austin